Tag Archives: home repair

A few months ago I made a passing comment about smashing a hole in our kitchen ceiling. We got home from Christmas dinner and there was water dripping from the ceiling. We promptly pulled down a large chunk of drywall in an attempt to figure out where it was coming from, having forgotten in that moment that all the plumbing from upstairs runs straight down into the basement and isn’t in the ceiling at all.

We did discover a vapor barrier, though, which was trapping a lot of the water (the eastern quarter of our kitchen doesn’t have any rooms above it, so the ceiling was insulated and the vapor barrier was installed to, I dunno, keep it in place?). You can sort of see it in this photo. There was enough water in it that it had found the edge of the plastic and was dripping from there through a seam in the drywall. We sliced open the plastic and let the water run out. It was immediately obvious that the water was coming from the friggin’ monsoon outside. If you’re in the general Twin Cities area you may remember the unseasonable horror show that happened on Christmas. Which, side note, we probably should not have been driving in. Oh well.

The next day, post-rain, we went out and looked and found this:

gee, I wonder how that rain got in.

Ta-da. What happened next is a long story of nothing actually happening. Insurance doesn’t cover the roof repair, and their estimate for the ceiling repair doesn’t meet our deductible which I’m not really mad about. We’d have to wait until spring for someone to get up and fix the roof, so we might as well wait to fix the ceiling as well in case it rained enough to leak more (while it did rain several times, no more water ever entered our kitchen).

Well! It’s spring. I hopped on Home Advisor last week, and they sent my contact info to three companies. They all called me back the next day. One guy came out that afternoon and gave us an estimate. Another took too long to call me back with his schedule. While I was waiting for estimator-guy to leave, I returned a call to the first company that had left me a voicemail and, spoiler alert, they’re the company who handled the repair. Because we had a smaller job, they could send a service tech out to do an estimate and repair all in one trip. Yesterday, Jerico from American Building Contractors came out, did a proper inspection to verify that the hole in our siding was in fact the source of our leak, and then fixed it. And not only was it super affordable, it was just shy of half the cost of the first estimate. I’m calling this a win. Now we just have to wait and see how long it takes us to get around to fixing the ceiling hole. Maybe a DIY? We’ll see.